Ukraine launches 1,000 drones at Russia in biggest ever strike on Moscow — SkimNews
Get the Geopolitics newsletter
Daily geopolitics — wars, elections, sanctions, the diplomatic moves that move markets. Free.
- Ukraine launched more than 1,000 drones at Russia overnight, with hundreds aimed at Moscow — the largest drone strike yet on the Russian capital, per Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, who called it "unprecedented" and an attempt to disrupt elections, adding "the enemy failed in this regard."
- Russia's Ministry of Defence said forces shot down 1,110 Ukrainian drones across Russia, Crimea, and the Black Sea, including 450 headed toward Moscow; the barrage damaged the Moscow Oil Refinery and a residential building, killing a 74-year-old man and a 44-year-old woman and injuring 20 across the wider Moscow region, per governor Andrei Vorobyov.
- Zelenskyy said Kyiv used domestically-made Flamingo and Pelican missiles alongside drones to strike oil and logistics facilities, arguing Kyiv was targeting "billions of dollars that sustain the war machine" — an explicit economic-warfare framing rather than just a show of force.
- Russian strikes killed at least five Ukrainian civilians in the same 24-hour window: a mother and her two children in the Kyiv region Saturday evening, with a fourth child dying in hospital Sunday, plus a clergyman at a monastery in Kherson region.
- The barrage coincided with the final day of Russia's first wartime parliamentary election — a vote virtually devoid of opposition that also extended to four annexed Ukrainian regions and Crimea, which Kyiv calls illegal.
- In Russian-occupied Kherson region, a Ukrainian attack killed a member of the local electoral committee, according to Russia's Central Election Commission — a counter-strike reaching into the voting apparatus itself.
Why it matters: Zelenskyy framed the strike as targeting oil and logistics infrastructure to pressure war funding rather than just flexing long-range air power, landing the escalation on Putin's election day for maximum political weight. But the Russian counter-strikes killed at least three Ukrainian children and a clergyman in the same window, underlining that escalation cuts both directions and that civilian populations on both sides are absorbing the cost.
Ask SkimNews
